From Panopticon to POV-opticon: Drive to Visibility and Games of Truth.

The paper proposes a theoretical framework to understand the emergency of the post-truth era in the specific realm of Internet visual culture, and analyses the aesthetic and technological conditions that allow a new form of post-truth to emerge. The paper argues that Internet post-truth could be addressed as the jeu de la vérité (game of truth) emerging from the transformation of the Panopticon – the form of visual governamentality of modernity – into the POV-opticon. The POV-opticon is a regime of visibility outlined by the explosion of POV (Point of view) technologies of vision – mobile phones, VR and AR technologies – which are transforming POV from a cinematic aesthetic and technical format into one of the most controversial political-aesthetic battlefields of our time. The capability of cinematic POV to produce the seamless overlapping between body and technology is re-invented in relation to new technological devices that re-defines human and machinic agency within new regimes of visibility and new games of truth. The paper tries to understand the POV-opticon by looking at the development of a new type of selfie aesthetic and of a new imagery coming out of the ongoing machinization of the face operated by facial recognition technologies – what I’ve tried to define elsewhere as the Algorithmic Facial Image (AFI). Especially by defining POV-opticon and AFI, the paper expands the notion of regime of visibility proposed by Dutch art critic Camel van Winkel, and relates it to the notion of games of truth elaborated by Michel Foucault. If, according to Winkel, the regime of visibility is more about the drive to make visible rather than the visible itself, the drive presents a peculiar relation with truthfulness which seems to fit well with the games of truth generated by the POV-opticon. Games of truth is Foucault’s attempt to rethinking the concept of regime of truth defining the Panopticon, in relation to distributed forms of governamentality and emerging forms of subjectivity. The paper argues that POV-opticon provides the technological strata for explaining post-truth as the hermeneutical reality emerging from the proliferation of POV games of truth. POV games of truth are assembled into new POV micro-regime of truth algorithmically generated by the extraction of data from the subject and by the creation of a POV data double that works as the algorithmic answer to the drive to visibility and offers a solution to the ambiguities of the games of truth.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Mitra Azar

Conference

Publication date: June 2019

Publication date (Print): June 2019

Pages: 114-118

Affiliations

[0001]Aarhus University

Helsingforsgade 14, 8200 Aarhus N,

Denmark

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM19.18

SO-VID: 4397d646-ae43-4ffa-9389-b7542093df16

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Politics of the Machine Beirut 2019

Conference acronym: POM2019

Conference number: 2

Conference location: Beirut, Lebanon

Conference date: 11-14 June 2019

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Politics of the Machine

History

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM19.18

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

M. Azar 2018 The algorithmic facial image and the relation between truth value and money Value APRJA, A peer review journal about 7 1 Available from: https://www.academia.edu/37522968/The_Algorithmic_Facial_Image_and_the_Relation_between_Truth_Value_and_Money_Value
R. Clarke 1988 Information Technology and Dataveillance Commun. ACM 31,5 Available from: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=42413
D. DonedaV. Almeida 2016 What is algorithm governance? IEEE Internet computing
M. Foucault 1980 1981 2014 Subjectivité et vérité Course au Collège de Fance Seuil-Gallimard Paris
M. Foucault 1975 Surveiller et punir Naissance de la prison Gallimard Paris
K. D. HaggertyR. D. Ericson 2000 The surveillant assemblage British Journal of Sociology 51 4 Available from: https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF3700/v17/bakgrunnsnotat/the_surveillant_assemblage.pdf
D. Lorenzini 2017 La force du vrai De Foucault à Austin Le Bord de l’Eau Lormont
D. Lorenzini 2015 What is a regime of Truth? Le Foucaldien 1/1 Open Access Journal for Research along Foucauldian Lines Available from: https://foucaldien.net/articles/10.16995/lefou.2/galley/2/download/
D. MirickE. Sanchez 1999 The Blair Witch project USA: Artisan Entertainment
R. Montgomery 1947 Lady in the Lake Metro Goldwin-Mayer USA
J. Ponsoldt 2017 The Circle STXfilms Europacorp, USA
C. Rollet 2018 The odd reality of life under China's all seeing credit score system Wired Available from https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-blacklist
S. Roy VosoughiS. D. Aral 2018 The spread of true and false news online M.I.T. Initiative on the Digital Economy Research Brief Available from: http://ide.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/2017%20IDE%20Research%20Brief%20False%20News.pdf
C. Winkel 2005 The regime of Visibility Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain Available from: https://www.onlineopen.org/the-regime-of-visibility
C. Winkel 2016 The regime of Visibility nai010 publishers Rotterdam

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] M. Azar 2018 The algorithmic facial image and the relation between truth value and money Value APRJA, A peer review journal about 7 1 Available from: https://www.academia.edu/37522968/The_Algorithmic_Facial_Image_and_the_Relation_between_Truth_Value_and_Money_Value

[2] R. Clarke 1988 Information Technology and Dataveillance Commun. ACM 31,5 Available from: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=42413

[3] D. DonedaV. Almeida 2016 What is algorithm governance? IEEE Internet computing

[4] M. Foucault 1980 1981 2014 Subjectivité et vérité Course au Collège de Fance Seuil-Gallimard Paris

[5] M. Foucault 1975 Surveiller et punir Naissance de la prison Gallimard Paris

[6] K. D. HaggertyR. D. Ericson 2000 The surveillant assemblage British Journal of Sociology 51 4 Available from: https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF3700/v17/bakgrunnsnotat/the_surveillant_assemblage.pdf

[7] D. Lorenzini 2017 La force du vrai De Foucault à Austin Le Bord de l’Eau Lormont

[8] D. Lorenzini 2015 What is a regime of Truth? Le Foucaldien 1/1 Open Access Journal for Research along Foucauldian Lines Available from: https://foucaldien.net/articles/10.16995/lefou.2/galley/2/download/

[9] D. MirickE. Sanchez 1999 The Blair Witch project USA: Artisan Entertainment

[10] R. Montgomery 1947 Lady in the Lake Metro Goldwin-Mayer USA

[11] J. Ponsoldt 2017 The Circle STXfilms Europacorp, USA

[12] C. Rollet 2018 The odd reality of life under China's all seeing credit score system Wired Available from https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-blacklist

[13] S. Roy VosoughiS. D. Aral 2018 The spread of true and false news online M.I.T. Initiative on the Digital Economy Research Brief Available from: http://ide.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/2017%20IDE%20Research%20Brief%20False%20News.pdf

[14] C. Winkel 2005 The regime of Visibility Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain Available from: https://www.onlineopen.org/the-regime-of-visibility

[15] C. Winkel 2016 The regime of Visibility nai010 publishers Rotterdam

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